


stay with me under my coat

by dovahfiin



Series: out on the side of the hill [2]
Category: Silent Hill (2006), Silent Hill: Revelation 3D (2012)
Genre: Cybil Bennett lives, F/F, F/M, Multi, Silent Hill - Freeform, that gay shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 20:46:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12779196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovahfiin/pseuds/dovahfiin
Summary: Sharon asks her father, and the darkness answers.





	stay with me under my coat

"Dad."

He pretends not to hear her. Pretends that the French press is impossibly complex, that he needs to fish out every individual coffee ground with the care of a surgeon. He can feel his daughter's eyes sliding underneath his skin.

_"Dad."_

It was so much easier when she was younger, just after Rose left. Mommy is gone, Mommy needs help to get better, Mommy stared in the face of the devil and wears a suit of condemned skin. Mommy still loves you.

"Goddammit, Dad. It's _coffee_." Her slim hand juts out and he startles, but the warm palm he's met with isn't comforting. She's older, she wants to know. He's avoided it for weeks, always hiding behind whatever freelance work he's doing ( **Harry Mason** says his business cards, glossy black ink that looks modern and professional and wrong) and consulting isn't something he can do from his living room. But he's here now, a free morning with no appointments that he can blame for his reluctance.

"You were young, and we didn't know what to do. Your mother" his throat spasms and he chokes a string of his own saliva at the back of his throat "took you to Silent Hill."

"Are you angry with her?" She asks casually, as if they're talking about baseball stats or what to have for dinner. Chris begrudges his daughter that simplicity. He can't remember the last decision he had the pleasure of making without meticulous planning. Without _fear_.

"I was. When she brought you back, we talked. I got angry, and I told her to leave you behind. That I was better equipped to care for you."

"What happened there?"

He's not used to hearing resignation in his daughter's voice. She's always known that something drove a wedge between her parents, has always known that she's adopted and the history of it is storied, but this is a new question in a new skin. Chris sees it burn passed her lips as she gives it breath, watches her downcast eyes follow the swirls of the wood in the table, up to his chin and settling in an intensity that makes him drop the French press. The grounds steam on the floor; Chris swears.

"Silent Hill was destroyed by a fire. The townspeople were in some sort of cult, and believed that your mother was a witch. They burned her, but she lived - the fires still burn beneath the city. I don't know much more than that."

Beneath his feet, the smoldering black coffee grounds steam and implode as they lose the shape of the filter that had contained them. The image makes Chris's stomach fold into itself.

Sharon's dark hair falls over here eyes in a thick cascade, hiding the trepidation that lurked just underneath. "Where is Mom?"

Chris takes a dust pan and a broom, raking over the mess only halfway, leaving marks where the grounds were too wet to be swept into the dust pan. Streaks on an otherwise spotless surface. Chris had been as blameless once.

"I don't know."

"So she isn't dead?"

"Not that I'm aware of. I'm sorry, Sharon." He doesn't raise his voice as his daughter runs from the room, doesn't even flinch when her bedroom door slams so hard the ceiling fan in the living room stutters.

Hours later, when the light has shifted and most of their small apartment is dark but for the ambient light from Chris's laptop, Sharon emerges from her room. She tiptoes downstairs, hoping that her father is asleep but her body jolts when he's sitting in front of his laptop staring at her. She's searched 'Rose Da Silva' until it became a popular, glowing on the face of her father's PC like a homing beacon for a lie. She lands at the bottom of the stairs and his eyes don't betray any emotion.

"You knew she wasn't dead. This whole time."

"I had to protect you. You don't know what kinds of people would come after you - the lengths they'd go to get you back to Silent Hill. You have to believe me."

"Do you know where she is?"

If he tells her the truth, she will go. If he tells her the truth, the plan they agreed on to create even a semblance of a normal life will be shattered. He cannot tell her. He cannot lose her. He closes the laptop, he lets the question sink into the marrow of him.

"No. I don't."

And that's the end of it, because Sharon sighs and looks upward as if the answer will be written on the white, sterile ceiling. Harry, since he's not Chris anymore, not after this, brushes passed his daughter and wanders to his bedroom. There is no solace in sleep anymore, but when his eyelids become too heavy, he knows without question: Sharon will go to Silent Hill. Sharon is her mother's child, and she will go to the gently falling ash because it runs in her very veins.


End file.
